The President of ICMSA, John Comer, said that it was already apparent that specific districts of Cork, Kerry, Waterford and Tipperary seemed to have taken the brunt of the storm damage. There was very significant numbers of trees down and damage to sheds – including roofs ‘peeled back’ or blown completely off – and there would doubtless be damage to machinery and plant reported over the next few days. But the most pressing matter now for dairy farmers would be the lack of power in their milking parlours in those areas where outages had occurred. “The problem here obviously is that where farmers don’t have generators or access to a generator then you have major problems around milking herds twice daily. We know that there are quite sizable areas of Munster where they are without power and the challenge is going to be around pooling generators and helping each other until the power is back up. We have to be realistic here as well and remember that restoring power to everyone after the winter storm of 2014 took longer than was initially anticipated. So farmers may have to come together – which they will do – and loan and swap generators and other equipment. Ophelia wasn’t perhaps as disastrous in some areas as feared but people should recognise that the reason for that was that we were prepared and forewarned and sincere gratitude is due to bodies like the Met Office, the Gardai, county council staff and others who managed to make what could have been an utter disaster someway manageable.